Bio-war's San Diego mavens

The long-smoldering intrigue over the potential use of so-called weaponized Ebola may soon receive a boost from obscurity by a Washington think tank with a notable tie to San Diego, already a national hotbed of Ebola research and commerce.

As previously reported here, Mapp Pharmaceuticals, developers of a widely reported anti-Ebola serum, linked itself to bio warfare in a March 2012 court filing that said its "primary business is to apply for and obtain grants from government agencies such as the Department of Defense and National Institutes of Health, to conduct research and develop biopharmaceuticals to combat infectious disease, prepare for outbreaks, and protect United States service men and women from biological warfare while serving our country abroad.”

A July 2011 paper by Larry Zeitlin, president of Mapp, cited intelligence from Ken Alibek, a defector from the former Soviet Union, noting, "It has been reported that [Ebola] was weaponized by the former Soviet Union."

Alibek, who has been a consultant to San Diego's Aethlon Medical, Inc., a maker of Ebola countermeasures, said in his 1999 book Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World — Told from the Inside by the Man Who Ran It, "I have no way of knowing whether a combined Ebola-smallpox agent has been created, but it is clear that the technology to produce such a weapon now exists.

"To argue that these weapons won’t be developed simply because existing armaments will do a satisfactory job contradicts the history and the logic of weapons development, from the invention of machine guns to the hydrogen bomb."

Though receiving little media attention, the Pentagon is known to have considered the threat of Ebola warfare seriously enough to have spent "tens of millions of dollars" on vaccine and therapy research, according to a Washington Post account this past August.

"Ebola is among a handful of emerging infectious diseases that have historically been explored as a potential biological weapon, and we are closely monitoring these types of infectious diseases," the Defense Department's Amy Derrick-Frost told the Post.

Enter the Hudson Institute, the think tank founded in 1961 by cold warrior Herman Kahn, which bills itself as "an independent research organization promoting new ideas for the advancement of global security, prosperity and freedom."

A key member of Hudson's board is Linden Blue, vice chairman of San Diego's General Atomics — most famous for making the Predator and Reaper drones, now a multibillion-dollar Pentagon mainstay — and a prominent sugar daddy to San Diego politicos of both parties.

In a past foray, Blue and the institute’s president emeritus Herbert London co-authored a 2011 newspaper opinion piece highly critical of president Barack Obama.

"It is instructive that President Obama employs the European model of entitlement, regulation and income redistribution as his guide," the pair wrote.

"It may be one of the few examples in history when a blatantly failed system is employed as a model for success. As the U.S. borrows more than 40 percent of the federal budget this year, we are perilously close to emulating the worst of Europe."

In a July 2011 op-ed, Blue, whose drones have been used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to detect drug smugglers, joined with Peter Bensinger, an ex-administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, to blast marijuana use.

"States that have implemented medical marijuana have three times higher drugged-driver fatalities than states that have no medical marijuana laws," the co-authors asserted.

Last week, Hudson bolstered another interest on its agenda through a new group called the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense.

"The panel is sponsored by the Hudson Institute and the Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies," according to a news release by the Alliance for Biosecurity, an association of drug firms including the Pfizer Company that says it was "formed in 2005 to improve the nation's biosecurity through the development of medical countermeasures to address bioterrorism and natural pandemic threats."

"With the Ebola outbreak and its devastating impact in the news," says the release, "the conversation about the need for preparing for public health emergencies including bio-terrorism, has re-emerged. This makes the timing of the formation of the Blue Ribbon panel helpful in advancing that conversation….

"The panel will assess the nation’s preparedness for biological and chemical threats, and will identify and recommend concrete actions to strengthen the country’s ability to respond to these threats."

Co-chaired by ex-senator Joe Lieberman and former Pennsylvania governor and Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, the panel also includes ex-governor and Health and Human Services secretary Donna Shalala, former senator Tom Daschle, and ex–Homeland Security advisor to former president George W. Bush, Kenneth Wainstein.

With Hudson's imprimatur, the biodefense panel appears designed to garner plenty of publicity, along with hoped-for federal funding, for the business of germ warfare.

Whether it sheds any light on the possible role of Ebola as a weapon of war and terror in Africa remains to be seen.